Cinelerra is prosumer

Prosumer

Prosumer is a portmanteau formed by contracting either the word professional or less often, producer with the word consumer. For example, a prosumer grade digital camera is a "cross" between consumer grade and professional grade...

 video editing software

Video editing software

Video editing software, is application software which handles the post-production video editing of digital video sequences on a computer non-linear editing systems...

. It is designed for the GNU/Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

. It is produced by Heroine Virtual

Heroine Virtual

Heroine Virtual is a company that creates open source software for the Linux operating system. Their most popular release is Cinelerra, a powerful open source non-linear video editor, considered the best available for Linux. The company remains completely anonymous, their reasoning for this is...

, and is free software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 distributed under the GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

. Cinelerra also includes a video compositing

Compositing

Compositing is the combining of visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene. Live-action shooting for compositing is variously called "chroma key", "blue screen", "green screen" and other names. Today,...

 engine, allowing the user to perform common compositing operations such as keying and mattes

Matte (filmmaking)

Mattes are used in photography and special effects filmmaking to combine two or more image elements into a single, final image. Usually, mattes are used to combine a foreground image with a background image . In this case, the matte is the background painting...

.

Cinelerra was first released August 1, 2002, and was based in part on an earlier product known as Broadcast 2000. Broadcast 2000 was withdrawn by Heroine Virtual in September 2001.

Notable features

Cinelerra includes support for very high-fidelity audio and video: it processes audio using 64 bits of precision, and can work in both RGBA

RGBA color space

RGBA stands for Red Green Blue Alpha. While it is sometimes described as a color space, it is actually simply a use of the RGB color model, with extra information. The color is RGB, and may belong to any RGB color space, but an integral alpha value as invented by Catmull and Smith between 1971 and...

 and YUVA

YUV

YUV is a color space typically used as part of a color image pipeline. It encodes a color image or video taking human perception into account, allowing reduced bandwidth for chrominance components, thereby typically enabling transmission errors or compression artifacts to be more efficiently...

 color space

Color space

A color model is an abstract mathematical model describing the way colors can be represented as tuples of numbers, typically as three or four values or color components...

s, using floating-point and 16-bit integer representations, respectively. It is resolution

Display resolution

The display resolution of a digital television or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. It can be an ambiguous term especially as the displayed resolution is controlled by all different factors in cathode ray tube , flat panel or projection...

 and frame rate

Frame rate

Frame rate is the frequency at which an imaging device produces unique consecutive images called frames. The term applies equally well to computer graphics, video cameras, film cameras, and motion capture systems...

-independent, meaning that it can support video of any speed and size. The application has a wide range of features.

Cinelerra interface

Cinelerra's interface is similar to that of other nonlinear

Non-linear editing system

In video, a non-linear editing system is a video editing or audio editing digital audio workstation system which can perform random access non-destructive editing on the source material...

 video-editing systems, such as Adobe Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro is a timeline-based video editing software application. It is part of the Adobe Creative Suite, a suite of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications developed by Adobe Systems, though it can also be purchased separately. When purchased separately, it comes...

. However, because it includes a compositing engine, it may also be likened to compositing software such as Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects is a digital motion graphics and compositing software published by Adobe Systems, used in the post-production process of filmmaking and television production. Its main uses are the origination of 2D and 2.5D animation, visual effects compositing and finishing...

 or Shake

Shake (software)

Shake is a discontinued image compositing package used in the post-production industry. Shake was widely used in visual effects and digital compositing for film, HD and commercials. Shake exposes its node graph architecture graphically. It enables complex image processing sequences to be designed...

. The user is presented with four screens:

1. The timeline, which gives the user a time-based view of all video and audio tracks in the project, as well as keyframe data for e.g. camera movement, effects, or opacity;
2. the viewer, which gives the user a method of "scrubbing" through footage;
3. the resource window, which presents the user with a view of all audio and video resources in the project, as well as available audio and video effects and transitions; and
4. the compositor, which presents the user with a view of the final project as it would look when rendered. The compositor is interactive in that it allows the user to adjust the positions of video objects; it also updates in response to user input.

Cinelerra's interface is frequently criticized because it does not conform to either GNOME

GNOME

GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...

 or KDE

KDE

KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...

 Human interface guidelines

Human Interface Guidelines

Human interface guidelines are software development documents which offer application developers a set of recommendations. Their aim is to improve the experience for the users by making application interfaces more intuitive, learnable, and consistent. Most guides limit themselves to defining a...

.

Cinelerra usage and awards

Cinelerra has gained ground among some Linux enthusiasts looking for a native video editing system. Professional use is mostly promoted by Linux Media Arts, which sells an integrated hardware and software package for video production that includes Cinelerra.

At the National Association of Broadcasters

National Association of Broadcasters

The National Association of Broadcasters is a trade association, workers union, and lobby group representing the interests of for-profit, over-the-air radio and television broadcasters in the United States...

' 2004 Electronic Media Show, Cinelerra was awarded Bob Turner's "Making the Cut" award. The award is given to "the best and most exciting postproduction products seen at the convention".

The Community Version

Heroine Virtual generates a new release of Cinelerra semi-annually, available as source code only. Any bugs and usability issues found and resolved by the community that are submitted to Heroine Virtual often result in no immediate response, and it is not until a new release that there is any indication that Heroine Virtual has incorporated these changes. Because of both the latency in development and the distribution-specific nature of the release, a group of free and open-source software developers created their own version of Cinelerra referred to as Cinelerra-CV (where CV stands for Community Version).

Cinelerra-CV allows the community to contribute to an open repository where changes to the code are accessible to everyone. Mailing lists and an IRC channel exist where more experienced users and developers can provide support to less experienced users, and developers can hold technical discussions. Cinelerra-CV is also packaged for a wider range of distributions. It also has a different compilation

Compiler

A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...

 system: system libraries are used extensively, and the autoconf

Autoconf

GNU Autoconf is a tool for producing configure scripts for building, installing and packaging software on computer systems where a Bourne shell is available....

/automake

Automake

GNU Automake is a programming tool that produces portable makefiles for use by the make program, used in compiling software. It is made by the Free Software Foundation as one of GNU programs, and is part of the GNU build system. The makefiles produced follow the GNU Coding Standards.It is written...

 tools are used to configure the compilation system.

Although Cinelerra-CV may technically be called a fork, the relationship between Heroine Virtual and Cinelerra-CV is rather friendly. Heroine Virtual at times contributes to discussions on the mailing lists, and incorporates many of the changes made in the repository. Heroine Virtual posted the following message on their website describing the relationship:
The versioning of Cinelerra-CV follows that of Heroine Virtual. After Heroine Virtual produces a release, Cinelerra-CV examines the changes introduced by the new version and merges them into their version. CV is appended to the end of the version number to indicate the community version. (For example, after the 2.1 merger the CV version is labeled 2.1CV.)

Lumiera rewrite

In the beginning of April 2008, the Cinelerra community announced a complete rewrite of the current community version, named as Lumiera. It was born as a rewrite of the Cinelerra codebase called Cinelerra3 but soon was separated into an independent project with its own name. Lumiera is still in an early stage of development, but has been making continuous progress (as of 5/2011) and now has a binary Debian build of the development preview available.

History

Date	Releases
August 6, 2011	Cinelerra 4.3 released.
October 15, 2010	Mainly a bugfix & personal need release. "Edit->Align edits" feature, which aligns all the audio edits with the video. Keyframe spanning feature, where highlighting a region with keyframe generation on causes effect tweeks to span all the keyframes. All assets are now opened in subprocesses so they don't bring down the entire program when they crash.
September 24, 2009	Cinelerra 4.1 released. Main feature is nested sequences.
August 8, 2008	Cinelerra 4.0 released
September 7, 2006	Cinelerra 2.1 merged into a community SVN version. (The first use of git Git (software) Git is a distributed revision control system with an emphasis on speed. Git was initially designed and developed by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development. Every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on...  and a multi-person merge)
July 2, 2006	Cinelerra 2.1 released
September 29, 2005	Cinelerra 2.0 merged into a community SVN version.
September 12, 2005	Cinelerra 2.0 released H.264 encoding and MPEG-4 audio encoding. Import MPEG video directly.
January 18, 2005	Cinelerra 1.2.2 merged into a community CVS version.
January 10, 2005	Cinelerra 1.2.2 released
August 16, 2004	Cinelerra 1.2.1 merged into a community CVS version.
August 8, 2004	Cinelerra 1.2.1 released Quicktime 2.0.4 updated. Enter the world of floating point imaging in this release. It's not just a more accurate colorspace, it's a totally new way of thinking about color. Finally, Cinelerra is officially more stable in 64 bit mode than 32 bit mode.
May 11, 2004	Cinelerra 1.2.0 released Cinelerra has a massive number of small changes. Quicktime finally decodes Sorenson and compressed headers.
February 17, 2004	Cinelerra 1.1.9 merged into a community CVS version.
February 11, 2004	Cinelerra 1.1.9 released This is a landmark since it's probably the first time more code was submitted from the community than internally.
October 5, 2003	Cinelerra 1.1.7 merged into a community CVS version.
August 11, 2003	Cinelerra 1.1.7 released
May 12, 2003	Cinelerra 1.1.6 released
April 29, 2003	Cinelerra 1.1.5 code "forked" into a community CVS version.
August 1, 2002	Cinelerra 1.0.0 released

See also

• Comparison of video editing software
  Comparison of video editing software
  This is a comparison of non-linear video editing software applications. See also a more complete list of video editing software.-General information:This table gives basic general information about the different editors:- System requirements :...
  
  
• Kdenlive
  Kdenlive
  Kdenlive is an open source video editing software package based on the MLT Framework that focuses on flexibility and ease of use...
  
  
• PiTiVi
  PiTiVi
  PiTiVi is a open source non-linear video editor developed by Collabora and contributors from the worldwide community. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. PiTiVi is designed to be intuitive video editing software that integrates well in the GNOME desktop...